Should You Fill Out the CSS Profile?

Hey guys, it’s Eric at Solution Prep, and today I’m answering the question: Should you fill out the CSS profile? The CSS profile is the College Scholarship Service, and it’s like the FAFSA (the free application for Federal Student Aid), but with a lot more questions. So it’s going to ask you a lot of the same questions from the FAFSA and then some.

It’s going to give you an opportunity to contextualize some of the information, let the colleges know if you’ve had some financial changes, et cetera. Only about 5% of American colleges request the CSS profile from domestic students, and it’s only used for need-based aid from the college. So if you are absolutely positively confident that you are never going to qualify for need-based aid, then you can skip the CSS profile. But if it would help to have some scholarships, to have some grants to afford college, and any of your colleges request the CSS profile, you should definitely fill it out.

You can get the answer to that question by Googling CSS Profile schools, and then clicking on that first link and getting this list. One thing you’ll notice in the top left corner is that the CSS profile is put out by the College Board. Which is, despite its official sounding name, a private non-profit corporation headquartered in New York. Not part of the government, and not something colleges are beholden to. They make products like the SAT or the APs, and in this case, the CSS profile. So your student can use their same CollegeBoard.org login that they use for those other tests as well.

You’ll also notice that only some colleges request this from domestic students. So if you sort over here, you’ll see that you can get rid of the colleges that aren’t requesting it from our American students. Next, I want you to notice that some colleges will also want to see information from a non-custodial parent. Which means, the custodial parent and the student will fill out their part of the CSS profile. They’ll answer questions about whether there’s another parent in another household. Then that other parent will, at the end, get an email to create their own login to fill out their own information. The parents won’t see each other’s information, but the college will see both. And one more thing you’ll notice over here is that some colleges request you to actually upload your documents, like a 1040, a W2, a 1099, maybe from the students as well as the parents, so take a look at that, and if you need help, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at 732-556-8220. We are here to help.